Lady Coventry had no greater admirer of her own charms than herself.  She spent her days worshipping at the shrine of her loveliness, and embellished nature with every device of art.  She squandered fortunes in adorning it with the most costly jewellery and dresses, of one of which the following story is told.  One day she exhibited to George Selwyn a wonderful costume which she was going to wear at an approaching fete.  The dress was a miracle of blue silk, richly brocaded with silver spots of the size of a shilling.  “And how do you think I shall look in it, Mr Selwyn?” she archly asked.  “Why,” he replied, “you will look like change for a guinea.”

[Illustration:  MARIA, COUNTESS OF COVENTRY]

Mrs Delany draws a remarkable picture of my lady at this culminating period of her vanity.

“Yesterday after chapel,” she writes, “the Duchess brought home Lady Coventry to feast me—­and a feast she was!  She is a fine figure and vastly handsome, notwithstanding a silly look sometimes about the month; she has a thousand airs, but with a sort of innocence that diverts one!  Her dress was a black silk sack, made for a large hoop, which she wore without any, and it trailed a yard on the ground.  She had on a cobweb-laced handkerchief, a pink satin long cloak, lined with ermine mixed with squirrel-skins.  On her head a French cap that just covered the top of her head, of blond, and stood in the form of a butterfly with wings not quite extended; frilled sort of lappets crossed under her chin, and tied with pink and green ribbon—­a head-dress that would have charmed a shepherd!  She had a thousand dimples and prettinesses in her cheeks, her eyes a little drooping at the corners, but fine for all that.”

Such vanities may be pardoned in a woman so lovely and so spoiled by Fortune, especially as her reign was fated to be as brief as it was splendid.  She was, perhaps, too fair a flower to be allowed to bloom long in the garden of this world.  Before she had been long a bride consumption sowed its deadly seeds in her; and she drained the cup of pleasure with the fatal sword hanging over her head.  She knew she was doomed, that all the medical skill in the world could not save her; and, with characteristic courage, she determined to enjoy life to its last dregs.

She saw her beauty fade daily, and pathetically tried to conceal its decay by powders and paints.  She grew daily weaker; but, with a brave smile, held her place in the vortex of gaiety.  Even when the inevitable end was near she insisted on attending the trial of Lord Ferrers for the murder of his steward.  As Horace Walpole says,

“The seats of the Peeresses were not nearly full, and most of the beauties were absent; but, to the amazement of everybody, Lady Coventry was there, and, what surprised me more, looked as well as ever.  I sat next but one to her, and should not have asked her if she had been ill, yet they are positive she has few weeks to live.  She was observed to be ’acting over all the old comedy of eyes’ with her former flame, Lord Bolingbroke, an unscrupulous rake, who seems to have striven for years to make her the victim of his passion.”

Her conduct, indeed, seems never to have been very discreet.